Fall-back

My son was born the first week of November... accompanied by the urban score of Election Day, the NYC Marathon... the first seasonal cold wind, the crush of dead leaves underfoot and the shocking afternoon darkness on the first Sunday of standard time setting. Each passing year I am overwhelmed by the nostalgia of parenthood. Our children cannot understand how we annually celebrate their arrival... how the indescribable agony of childbirth announced that we were splitting ourselves in two... how we sang silly songs and blew out candles but in our heart was the future soundtrack of an unwritten Roy Orbison ballad.

Even with photographs, it's difficult for our kids to understand the young, naive woman who was their mother, the novel intimacy of harboring a growing human inside a body whose power we'd maybe only recently absorbed. In my case, I was fulfilling a callow promise I'd made to my husband-- to have his child, despite serious reservations.  Our courtship had been brief but intense; 'no one will ever love you the way I do,' he repeated as he showed up in airports, intercepted my daily itinerary, flew transatlantic until he was broke, waiting for me to nod my head while he begged, on one knee, for me to become Mrs. British Journalist.  

So when my husband strayed, I tried to brush it off-- he was insecure-- he was dramatic; it would fade. I waited it out, remembering the pleading oaths he'd sworn... and then the surprise of pregnancy. I grew up quickly... held out hope, suffered. It wasn't so much the demise of the marriage as the betrayal of something in which I'd let myself believe. I talked to my growing stomach-- confessed, confided.  I'd agreed to define myself as part of a couple... and now the definition had become smeared-- obsolete... wrong. I no longer knew who I was or even where, having transported all my instruments and gear to the UK.

We urban dwellers learn to sleep through sirens... but the subdued quiet of a West-London 3 AM was more than I could bear. I returned to my city where the noise drowned out sorrow, the autumn rain camouflaged  wet eyes, and pounds of candy corn took the place of whiskey. I got up on smoky stages looking like a balloon and played my blue bass.

Who am I, I wondered, as I walked November midnight streets of Manhattan with a baby carriage? My exhaustion was overwhelming but did not translate into sleep. I felt hollow without my maternal stomach, traumatized at the act of separation and terrified of the task of raising a person when I no longer recognized the skin I was in: someone's mother... a nursing machine, one-half of a couple whose future was a puzzle, whose past was maybe just a terrible mistake-- a con job?

Thirty-six years later I woke up today after setting back my manual clock, having watched the last game of an entertaining World Series I would never have enjoyed had I not raised a sports-obsessed man. The apple fell far from this tree. I began the day with a radio interview; somewhere in the world people were hearing my music... it was shocking, in a way.  Somewhere I was still a musician-- a songwriter, despite this waking image of my life as a kind of huge parchment game-basket with thousands of lettered tiles leaking out in piles. 

Last week I watched a documentary on dying.  It was distressing-- horrifying, dismantling.  Again-- who are we, creatures who frantically train our bodies and minds-- run errands and break hearts... when we are all headed for the same unappealing and painful fate? 

Savoring my free hour after the clock resetting, I noticed Sheryl Crow was on PBS with a less-impressive Jason Isbell, conversing about her songwriting and playing samples in the grand hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an exceptional sound system and a rapt sophisticated audience. Jason's accompaniment was annoying.  She is very polished-- even with her pancake make-up and false eyelashes... she can sing. I pondered her lyrics 'If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad.' Is this art? Am I bitter?  The last gig I played I went home on the subway with $60. I considered walking 5 miles to save $1.45. According to the internet, the starting range to book Sheryl Crow is between $300,000 and $499,000.   I remember meeting her, many years ago-- juggernauting along with her endorsements and rockstar hookups, following her dream on the road while I was wheeling around a baby. Not that there is a musical comparison. And after great success, Sheryl has more or less purchased motherhood.

I've noticed my son's friends are beginning to have grey hairs.  This ages me. His very boyish former science teacher greeted me in the street the other day... 'Did I recognize him,' he wanted to know, sheepish about the fact that he was now fifty-something? Are we judged by the way others see us?  I remember well, after a high-school musical performance, my mother asked 'You think you're good? This is high school!' These were my parents... maybe I over-processed their judgment which was skewed by the fear that their daughter might make the terrible choices I've since embraced.  

Tonight in the early dusk the sidewalks are littered with trampled discarded marathon signs and placards. Some of the runners were still limping along Fifth Avenue nearly twelve hours after the starting gun-- some falling short of their goal, some failing entirely.  I'm almost relieved another November milestone is over. Tuesday the mayoral elections will pass, and then it will be my son's thirty-sixth birthday.  He will celebrate with his friends; I will not share my nostalgia and current malaise... he seems to be happy with who he is at the moment-- not to question or doubt, not to empathically suffer along with ill friends and neighbors the way I do.  He will enjoy spending his money eating and drinking. He does not think about his absent father whom he barely recalls, and he certainly is little acquainted with the dark streak that marks my heart like a cross, like a wound. 

Meanwhile, hearing my own song 'Black Bells' on a radio show reminded me I am consistent if nothing else, and not ashamed of what I have produced, although I could always be better. Hard to judge oneself, and if one doesn't exploit social media, there is little access to external judgement or assurance.  Am I happy, in the Sheryl Crow sense?  Do I regret? No... maybe...  I endure these phases-- the doubt and black moods a lifetime of creativity, intermittent betrayal and suspension of belief have guaranteed. They are my 'material', for better or for worse, 'til death do me part.  If I choose, I can hear the sirens, but have learned-- Daylight Saving or Eastern Standard-- to sleep with them. 

Leap of Faith

I've always been a 29 sort of person.  After all, it's the first two slashes of my birth date... and if you add up all the digits, including year, it's what you get-- sort of a secret numerical surname.  Plenty of babies were born today... although mothers will celebrate most years on the 1st of March-- a misdeed, in my book.  I mean, technically one is born on the day after 28, but February has a totally unique profile.  And its oddity, its fluidity... well, it's calendar architecture-- like the mistake woven intentionally into Amish quilts, to remind of the fallibility of all things human. 

For those who obsessively wish their Facebook friends a happy birthday, there was a bit of relief; only two names came up in my reminders, neither of which seemed familiar.  My 'Memories' notifications brought back the previous February 29th activities-- gigs with my beloved Alan who just four sun-cycles ago, one leap year, was still vital and singing his damn heart out in the dive bars of downtown.

When I was young, I chose to see the 29th as a sort of holiday-- a temporal snow day-- the gift of extra time we only perceive on the arbitrary fall close of Daylight Saving Time... that odd hour I've always treated with a kind of reverence, even though it's taken back in the spring. 

I spent much of the day returning phone calls, speaking to friends, finishing up a Brassai biography of Henry Miller complete with photos.  For all the nostalgia this generation seems to have for our city in the 70's and 60's... it pales compared with the bohemians of New York in the 1930's.  No one more punk and passionate than our Henry who lived a life on both continents.  The edge.  

Many of my friends seem stuck.  Life since the pandemic has yet to return to normal... but there is no longer 'that' normal.  It occurs to me that 'normal' is a hindsight kind of thing.  I overheard my downstairs neighbor discussing with her 5-year old their 'new normal'.  Like everything in this culture, the moments are shortened-- the eras are temporary, the semesters are eras, fashion is passé nearly before it emerges; the world is reborn in an instagram blink.

And yet I carry with me some sense of solidity... like one of those black-and-white photos of a wiry musician, half-starved, wearing a wifebeater, walking maybe a New Orleans street with his horn tucked under his arm-- no case.  I can almost whistle the music in his head-- no cheap soundtrack: this is the real deal here, and it comforts me like a kind of visual rosary.

My niece is struggling.  We endlessly discuss suicide-- not as an act, but a kind of boundary.  It's bantered around so cheaply these days, and the ease of overdosing has made it constant conversation.  Even Flaco the owl-- who's to say he didn't simply have enough? Tired of being an instagram sensation, tired of having his every move photographed and documented, of being stalked by birders in Central Park.  He couldn't even enjoy a solitary meal.  All things must pass.  Besides, death changes everything. The dead Beatles will always be the more sacred for me. 

Of all the visual poetics in my city, the bridges are perhaps my favorite... all of them... including the Hells Gate whose very name frightens.  I love to walk across the East River and look down, between the slats... and wonder at the engineering challenge of past centuries-- these literal and conceptual linkages.  Yet-- they have become symbols of another kind of leap-- the one without faith, the one of despair.  These jumper dramas-- the narratives--  have become part of the lore... the river, the piles and the girders-- the soaring arcs-- the height, the distance.. the approach... the symbolisms. What we humans make of what we have made...

The way I see things, we all have a sort of room-- our solitary confinement.  We leave, we travel, we love, we mess around-- but the proverbial room is our least common denominator-- our reset.  for some it is the size of a closet, but this is delusion.  Anyway, in one corner is the past-- which begins to hog space, to encroach.  In another are the regrets and hauntings. Maybe another-- for my niece-- the appeal of drugs-- of escape-- the ultimate 'free' but that, too, is another closet-- a dead end, quite literally. And somewhere, when one throws open the curtains, is the window of suicide... the false window, actually, because the light is made of reflection-- not sunlight or even starlight but a kind of thick, stale, smoky yellow. 

And then there is you... you are the room, with the possibilities and tools waiting in the most inviting corner, the one beneath the suicide window you will not use because you prefer risks and fear and passionate love... and a door that opens onto a house of dreams, in a world of your own design, where it matters less that you belong, than that you simply existed, and left your unique footprint, maybe even a multiple of 29.

HOLLOW-E'EN

I was shocked this evening to see a bit of manifested holiday cheer on the streets, children and parents in costumes-- trick or treating, I suppose, at doorways of shops, grocery stores...  merriment in the park... adults on bicycles dressed as ghosts and Teletubbies.  I'm not sure what I'd be doing if I had young children-- does one keep up the illusion that life is going on as it did, that joy and celebration are still appropriate even during a pandemic?  We Americans-- we make the best of things, I've heard.  Some of us.  

In 1961 I wore one of my father's old suit jackets, pinned and rolled up-- a Stetson hat and a John F Kennedy rubber mask.  It was a good disguise for me, the perennial tomboy who at that moment hated makeup and princess clothes--  low-maintenance and warm.  I tried to imitate the walk of a war hero-turned political leader-- really the first President I celebrated in my young life.  He was a young, handsome father, like my Dad-- a former soldier.  We were old enough to follow the election in school and we loved him.  Again in 1964 I'd looked through my closet for ideas-- was way more enthusiastic about theatre and music and boys than trick or treating...  considered reviving the Kennedy mask, but post-mortem it seemed more tastelessly macabre and politically incorrect.  

Today I saw Trump masks-- left over from 2016?  New ones made with the irony of the very image of the mask-shunner stamped like a grotesque advertisement for the Corona virus?  Hard to decipher whether the wearers are haters or supporters.  An army of Trump faces on the street is as scary as Halloween gets.  Pumpkinheads. 

Last night I was so agitated about the upcoming election I slept not at all.  To distract myself I memorized the presidential sequence.  Incredible to me I've lived through twelve and hopefully will see thirteen in a matter of months.  As an early voter, I forgot I'd have this feeling of helplessness as the day approaches; not much we can do but encourage others.  It's politics, it's numbers... but I've still not fully recovered from the devastating mental hangover of November 9, 2016.  It can't happen again... but yes, it can.  

Out of the 45 names I litanised, there were some bad ones; we lived.  I can't blame the entire pandemic on one man... and yet he's become the symbol-- the mask, as it were, of evil-- of 'spread'... the very opposite of a Protector, a hero-- a blunderbuss opportunist who's turned America into a casino culture.  A cartoon-man whose flaws and failures have been woven into the very fabric of this country in a way that is unprecedented and more horrifying than any haunted house I can imagine.

I have this image in my mind... of a quiet parade-less Thanksgiving morning with one enormous balloon in the shape of an obese Donald Trump floating above the city, children being given old-fashioned pea-shooters or plastic darts.  Pin the tail on the Trump-donkey.  But today, after a sleepless night, I saw the boarded-up windows of Macy's-- a city on edge,  anticipating unrest-- catastrophe.  This is more than an election... this is not a democratic process but a seismic sociologic event.  

Just one year ago I was a musician.  Halloween for decades was not just a children's holiday but a gig-- revelry and dancing.  We played and shared microphones, sang our hearts out-- swapped sweat, licked strings and kissed one another.  We exchanged vampire teeth and masks, ate candy corn and hung plastic skulls from our guitar-necks.  We did Misfits covers and carved out pumpkins.  It is hard to think about being a musician when there is no live music.  What am I?  What are we?  We are diminished-- we are masked not from celebration but from fear.  

It's not just Halloween and a rare blue moon, but the one day of the year we are given an extra hour.  November is beginning on a 'loaded' night... spirits are flitting around, and the cold autumn air is fraught with socially distanced energy and urbanites jacked up on sugar and alcohol.  Kids are resilient, but even they know how much we've lost in the past seven months; the novelty has worn off.  I'm tired of thinking my future will be little more than nostalgic reminiscence-- story-telling.  Tonight I am measuring my life by presidents... ready for my thirteen.  Whatever lurks out there for us, let there be a little hope and humanity-- something more than candy wrappers and smashed pumpkins.  We have less choice than usual, but we can put our faith in a man with a mask, or throw our chips in with a human mask that camouflages a hollow man.  Once in a blue moon, we might deserve a miracle.